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How Many Bits Does It Take To Kill You?
pegr writes "Andrew 'bunnie' Huang, Reverse Engineer, XBox hacker, and generally smart guy, muses over the H1N1/swine flu virus as only a reverse engineer can: 'I now know how to modify the virus sequence to probably make it more deadly.' Not that he would, of course. bunnie has consistently made the esoteric available to us mere mortals, and his overview of the H1N1 virus is a fascinating read from a unique perspective." (Seen today also at the top of Schneier on Security.)
To kill a Snow Leopard.
All depends on how you count, I guess...
It's like evolution is the demo coder and humans are the Amigas.
The Epstein-Barr virus, now there is a successful virus.
Liberty.
If only biologists had thought of the idea of treating DNA/RNA sequences as data, and then analyzing their properties statistically and computationally, with an eye towards what effects different modifications to the sequences might be predicted to have. We might call this field something fancy like "biological informatics".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7026801162637347552
Error establishing a database connection
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
How many bits does it take to kill a human? Bits of what is the real question?
Bits of information? Bits of bullets? Bits of concrete? Bits of glass? Bits of a virus?
They can all get the job done given the right, er wrong, context.
3.2KiB of data with the flu eh?
How about three bytes, 24 bits, uttered from the mouth of Bush? "War"! That killed a whole bunch of people with a lot less information. Ok, sure there was lots of supporting info.
Many people have died from a lot fewer bits than the flu needs.
May I congratulate you on the sheer cringe-worthy awfulness of today's pun. Much appreciated!
Regards,
In Cog Neato
On behalf of the worldwide collective of dads who make bad jokes.
I don't know, go ask Mr. Owl.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
As we extinguish species by the ark load it's worth musing where all their on board viruses and bacterium will land when they jump ship onto a new species. Reminds me of the ship of sick sailors who landed in Italy with the first boat load of rats bearing the plague. Supposedly many of the viruses that now plague us have adapted to us by way of our domestic livestock, especially fowl. We may be setting the table for the little critters with our obsessive need for antibiotics and wiping all indoor surfaces down with lethal cleaners. The Swiss did some research and found that farm kids raised tending livestock had stronger immune systems than Swiss city kids raised in sanitized urban housing.
ideopath @ play
Sounds like we need a firewall.
In bunnie's example, compares a DNA sequence form H1N1 with that of a more deadly flu strain. He points out that one could substitute just 1 lycine amino acid and the result would possibly make H1N1 far more deadly. Such sequences can be ordered from Internet DNA synthesis companies. Somebody with access to an H1N1 sample, a lab, and some skill could do this...
Change 1 of the DNA base and the embryo cannot grow to completion. Change a base and a cancer can suddenly develop and go awry (for example, kill the apoptose system of the cells). Kill one bit in the mytochondrial DNA and you probably get the same. I am not a biologist , and I am sure there are a lot of redundant gene, but some might not.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Hoax.Beauchamp argued the focus should be strengthening the host rather than the disease.
Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout
I roll big bits.
Google cached link
Although for many unwashed masses your ramblings look quasi-brilliant, your analysis has WAY too many holes. Each triplet is translated into ONE of TWENTY amino acids. You know what? Some triplets are translated to the SAME amino acids. Your analysis is bunk. Learn your biology.
64K ought to be enough for everybody.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
Only if the firewall also performs deep packet inspection. Many bad critters (viruses/bacteria) enter the system by making our firewall(s) think they are innocuous by externally looking link other good critters. It is the payload that is the real problem. If we could teach the body to somehow read the payload before docking with the receptors we could be disease (contracted from viruses/bacteria) free.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
A big ol' bit out of the jugular vein is enough to kill anyone.
Biotech companies that synthesize long oligos have been asked by our kind overlords to screen any synthesis requests for pathogen sequences. But maybe with all the garage bio labs springing up these days the oligo blackmarket is nigh upon us?
Only if the firewall also performs deep packet inspection. Many bad critters (viruses/bacteria) enter the system by making our firewall(s) think they are innocuous by externally looking link other good critters. It is the payload that is the real problem. If we could teach the body to somehow read the payload before docking with the receptors we could be disease (contracted from viruses/bacteria) free.
Nanoprobe-supported organs. Once again, Star Trek has beaten us to it.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
32 bytes, 256 bits..
Don't you think she looks tired?
The television will not be revolutionized.
I just had to say, seriously?
Now go smoke some more weed and think of new, "interesting" ideas. Don't forget to connect unrelated facts. It makes it that much more profound and unique.
http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/ is a wonderful comparison of DNA to code
All your (swine flue) base are belong to us.
Yours In Disease,
Kim
is how many bits would it take to kill his server.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Yes, troll feeding is bad, but honestly,
that there was a Swine Flu vaccine back in the 1970's that caused a 300% mortality rate on all the "volunteers,"
This alleged vaccine killed the subject, revived them, killed them a second time, revived them again, and finally killed them off (for good) a third time?
Math is hard, clearly.
The 26,000-some bit virus only exists in the context of a host that contains considerably more DNA information than that. To use the awful computer analogies, it's like running a 26K program on a 300MB interpreter system; the small program just calls some combination of really complex, pre-built functions that shouldn't be called in that combination.
And keep in mind that the 300MB interpreter is meaningless without the context in which it executes: some physical machine.
Are you adequate?
just one, depending where it bits you
This article is misleading in supposing that the nucleic acid sequence represents the only information in encoded in a virus. A naked nucleic acid strand wouldn't make it very far in the wild. Here are some extra sources of information applicable to influenza:
1) RNA modifications
2) protein modifications
3) 8 different strands (the cut points are information)
4 - n) The tiny matter of the structure and organization of the virus, its proteins counts and arrangements, and the way that its RNA strands are packaged (see the wikipedia article for more on this).
So, the information contained in a single virus is far higher than its nucleic acid sequence. I'm not dead yet.
Seriously? I had no idea we knew enough about "how dna works" and "what dna does" to even begin to make a metaphor about the simplest examples of it
Actually, they had a control group who were given a placebo who also died even though they had not even been given the vaccine. Also, the researchers died and through luck these two groups were each the exact same size as the group given the vaccine, thus the 300% mortality rate.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Not to mention a rather nifty virus scanner in the transporter buffer... Oh yeah and you can patch it too. They even unintentionally made a backup copy of commander Riker. It's easy when you can just throw out every crazy idea you got.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It would actually take less than that, though it wouldn't spread the same way. Remember that prions are proteins that can kill you rather than whole viruses. The protein that gets misfolded in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or mad cow) seems to be called just Prion protein and is only 253 amino acids. If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits, then thats 1,518 bits. "Bit calculator" tells me that would be 0.185 kbytes.
Granted, this wouldn't be airborne death, would be extremely slow, and wouldn't cause a pandemic, but still, far less data.
Even if you were to go the viral route, at least one virus is tricky in that it produces multiple proteins from overlapping reading frames. That is, the same sections of RNA genome (sendai uses RNA instead of DNA) is read in multiple ways to make different functional proteins, one protein might be formed from reading AUG GAU GGG CAG, which would make the amino acid sequence MDGQ, but that could aso be read as A UGG *AUG* GGC AG where the starred AUG is the start, making a protein of MG. I find that pretty cool, because as Carl Sagan pointed out, try doing that with english. "Romancement to get her" can be spaced differently to produce "roman cement together" is the longest he could come up with and it doesn't even make sense. Viruses make whole proteins that work. Anyway, the point of all that was that viruses can in some cases double up, so it would take even fewer nucleotides to produce the same amount of protiens.
That's being bit 3.2*1024*8 times! Or 3.2*1000*8 times if you're into distinguishing between kibiytes/kilobytes. But that's still a lot. Imagine that many mosquitoes...
All depends on which bits you can change.
:).
If you can change the constants of the universe I'm sure you only need to change one bit to kill everyone
If you throw in Meme Theory, humans would be more like two Amigas: one running a demo which makes it think its running the other demo by choice, when actually neither were a choice.
Um, it's pretty obvious he's talking about the Umbrella Corporation.
I see it now.
We are bio servers and this whole virus thing is just people from the demo scene trying to outcode each other!
The fact that you are not modded funny shows how little most people understand what a proper study is.
That sentence ended poorly.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Oh, yeah, I saw the documentary on that by Shinji Mikami.
It's humblings that I could be killed by 3.2kbytes
3.2 kbytes should be enough to kill anyone.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
How many bits make up cyanide ? it like 4 or 5 molecules, and has a lovely almond smell to it. or so iv heard.
" 'I now know how to modify the virus sequence to probably make it more deadly.' "
I have some serious doubt. Ignoring the fact that 'make it more deadly' is a bit(lot) vague, it's not a pile of bits.
Also, there is a long way between designing a virus, and being able to make it.
OTOH, he does hack a trivial easy piece of hardware, so maybe he did it with dust tape, spit and MacGyvers seman.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What if 2 of that bits are ninjas?, and what if they have tiny shurikens? by the way...AMAZING and beautiful article.
This is the internet, censorship is easy to get around, post a link, you whack job.
300% mortality makes no sense and add to the suspicion that you are a loon that can't think for themselves.
No one is forgetting about the Swine flu scare in 70.
in 1970 the virus was engeneered? something thats only doable on a priomative scale with todays technology?
You ahve gotten sucked into the 'world cons;piracy' meatal state. Logically waht you are saying make no sense, so instead of realizing that, you ahve created an invisible secret conspiracy. One that would profit a lot more if it actually had the technology from above board uses.
"My main /. account is posting at -1 just because of my critical thoughts of EVER finding myself dependent on my fellow man. I want independence; Wisdom decides what knowledge I seek, so as to not have an untactical command of random unsorted information."
You need to log into some psychiatric help.
Seriously, uyou are sounding non sensicle. I know it makes sense to you, but to most people it's jibberish. This is a bad sign.
No one is out to get you,
There is no conspiracy
You need help.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Looking at the amino acid and codon table I noticed another interesting point: The triples which code for the same amino acid typically differ only in the last base. Indeed, this can be made stronger: Except for the STOP codon, in each set of codons with no more than four members, the first two bases are always the same (for those with more than four codons that's of course not possible). Moreover, quite a few amino acids have exactly four codons which differ only in the last base, i.e. the amino acid is completely and unambiguously determined by the first two bases alone. Indeed, one can rearrange this into the following 16-entry table:
Note how many lines only have one entry on the right hand side. Could this mean the genetic code evolved from a two-base version (with only 15 amino acids) to the current three-base version?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You are assuming that humans are the primary host. That's what's scary about these cross-species viruses. Even if a strain were to mutate that killed every single human it infected within hours, as long as it is harmless to it's original animal host then it will continue to spread just fine. And if that species shares a close environment with humans (rats, birds, etc), then it will continue spreading to us as well.
Bruce Schneier can kill a man with a single 0 bit.
Or we can try a modern day example: expertsexchange
experts-exchange
expert-sex-change
I remembered in the good old days, my network access got suspended once because they triggered a naive web url history scanner....
:(){:|&:}
The protein that gets misfolded in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or mad cow) seems to be called just Prion protein [nih.gov] and is only 253 amino acids. If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits, then thats 1,518 bits.
But the same sequence of amino acids exists normally in us, as a useful protein. What makes the prion variant dangerous is that the amino acid chain has folded slightly differently, to form a different shape - so it's in the file metadata, not the file itself.
2 bits: a flying quarter dropped from a skyscraper
So how many bits does it take to kill Andrew Huang's web server?
"To ground this in a specific example, six bits stored as âoeATGâ on your hard drive (DNA) is loaded into RAM (RNA) as âoeAUGâ (remember the T->U transcription). When the RNA program in RAM is executed, âoeAUGâ is translated to a pixel (amino acid) of color âoeMâ, or methionine (which is incidentally the biological âoestartâ codon, the first instruction in every valid RNA program). " I think this is a little backwards, because the letters match A-T and G-C, so when "ATG" is copied to RNA it would be "UAC". Or is there a double-reversal somewhere?
I thought it said "How Many Brits Does It Take To Kill You?".
Or we can try a modern day example: expertsexchange
experts-exchange
expert-sex-change
I remembered in the good old days, my network access got suspended once because they triggered a naive web url history scanner....
I assume they also blocked the partner sites:
amateursexchange.com
and
diysexchange.com
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
That's a good point although in looking up the size of prion protein I found some articles suggesting that there are some mutant forms which cause it. Presumably those mutations predispose the protein to fold the wrong way. You're right, folding wasn't represented by bits, but the same goes for bunnie's avian-swine flu virus. Simply typing out the nucleotide or amino acid code won't do anything, neither will actually generating a stretch of DNA or RNA that is the virus' genome, the virus still needs proteins to activate, so it's not just data that kills you.
If I'm not mistaken, there are some plant viruses that are only RNA. I don't know a whole lot about them, but I think there's probably some RNA enzyme activity that goes on there, so again it's not quite "data" that kills there.
Coral Cache of the site, not running super fast but it'll get there.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Actually, there are only 4 European and European-American Nobel Prize laureates. All of those "European" laureates are actually Jewish. Wikipedia it if you have to, son.
Of'course, none of you over-looked his typo and instead go onto an off-topic thread about some non-existant statistic that gives you teh funnay modz.
Fig your parent poster. Fig the OP.
Fig you too, GEEKOID!
God hates figs for a reason, slackers.
The protein that gets misfolded in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or mad cow) seems to be called just Prion protein and is only 253 amino acids. If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits, then thats 1,518 bits.
So you're saying that it would take just 11 posts on Twitter to kill someone?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I'm pretty sure one bit can kill you... if your logic levels are 50,000V and -50,000V, anyway.
Are you unable to get your information from googlesearching? Are you in a country that blocks certain search phrases? Well maytbe you should just get your information from querying APOTHECARYHERBS.COM or it's host research on the matter of Swine Flue back in the '70's because I'm not going to hold your hand after how you insulted me you vile little worm. And it's highly profitable to spread diseases for which only you have the cure. I mainly work on Herbal remedies, and have developed several poltice formulas to draw the poisonous vaccines out of the injection site. I find it laughable how you and others blindly endorse commercial products with an equal understanding of a placebo. This is truly a sad turn of events. And here you are insulting me in an off-topic way as though you think you are the only psychology professor on Slashdot (despite having poor direction of advice nonetheless);
Telemarketers, unstamped none-classed mail, and a sour fog is out to get both of us, and I'm sure you would have a recommendation for others just to spread your US'ian jurisdiction that created the problem in the first place. America, home of the vending machines and World capitor of the toilette seat, a bankrupt debtor nation trying to become the ideological oracle of all the propserous humble coutries that don't cannibalize eachother like the Tax collectors and Pentagon of USA.
Stop hurting yourself, geekoid. You need to get yourself some help. Think of your children, think of them fondly for being the one's that will be paying for your bad decisions; bad decisions beginning with your retirement, why your rectum is over-stretched from Slashdot and figging.
Slashdot is such a wasteland of VA, and as much as ESR is to blame it's more of the participants.
Boy has joined the chat.
[Boy] Mr. Owl, how many bits does it take to kill you?
[MrOwl] A good question. Let's find out. A one... A two-HOO... A three...
MrOwl has left the chat.
[Boy] Three!
So you're saying that it would take just 11 posts on Twitter to kill someone?
Well 11 posts into a twitter feed and I'm willing to kill myself, so yeah...
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
I believe that RNA can just kill you - or the DNA - if it gets inside your cells (the hard part - but can happen easily sometimes). Your cell will just pick up the DNA/RNA and do whatever it says, usually along the lines of make more virus. The outer coating (proteins) are just the vessel to carry the DNA into your cells. Some, however, come with their own spiffy enzymes that embed the DNA into your genome so you can make plenty more...years later (retro) - maybe generations later, but I don't know if that's actually been documented in people (plants, this has been seen). All this is generalized and there are distinct types of virii (viruses? Hate the Latin stuff...) that each do their own thing, but it's the "data" you want to worry about for the most part. Mileage may vary, I'm not a virologist, etc.
If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits...
Well, you could possibly argue that it isn't. I haven't read bunnie's argument, because his blog is slashdotted at the moment, so here's my reasoning FWIW: OK, it takes 3 codons (base pairs) to make one amino acid, but there are 4 bases in DNA or RNA. So in the first place we are working from a tetragesimal code rather then binary. If we assigned numerical values for these (0 to 3) then you obviously need more than two bits to represent a value of 2 in base 4.
If the grandma you're thinking of is the former Governor of Alaska, you're thinking wrong:
But don't let the facts get in the way of The Narrative.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
But then a whole lot of weak humans would get live and then life wouldn't be so darned special.
They've been doing that on Celebrity Jeopardy for years!
"I'll take Catch the semen for $800"
Thumb down was good.
What numbnuts is probably trying to reference is the 1976 Swine Flu Outbreak and the associated problem with Guillain-Barré syndrome that is a rare side effect of modern influenze vaccines. GBS occurs at a rate of about 1 in one million vaccines, which is normally an acceptable risk given the potentially deadly nature of the flu to those with compromised immune systems.
Due to the panic that occurred in 1976 when an army recruit at Fort Dix died from what was determined to be a new strain of swine flu at the time, President Ford followed the recommendations of the public health service and pushed for full vaccinations for the US population. However, this was ultimately halted when it became apparent that the original outbreak had been entirely stopped and that the GBS side effects from the vaccine were killing more people than the virus had.
Ultimately, 25 people died from GBS-related complications of the vaccine, while only one person appears to have died from the virus, hence the mathematics that the AC above butchered into "300% mortality rate on all volunteers" which I'm sure was due to his repeating something that he didn't understand. However, it does show the problems of upside vs downside analysis for health emergencies on a large-scale.
The interesting part for a bioinformatics person should be the application of reverse engineering techniques and abstraction to the problem space.
With respect, you're not really thinking like a Craig Venter or Sam Levy, or like a reverse engineer.
If I were attempting to reverse engineer the ability to program a computer, for example mitochondrial ribosomes, with an unknown instruction set, for example mRNA, and all I knew was how to make random sequences of mRNA, not how the equipment itself actually functioned, then I'd get a bunch of equipment (cells) together and throw random mRNA at it until I could make statistical correlations between the input (the mRNA) and the output (the proteins). And I would do this in parallel, on as much equipment as I could afford to get together, to shorten the amount of time it took me to get to the desired result. From an engineering perspective, that's the output, not how to create a cycle-accurate simulator or document the entire instruction set by sending the computer off to ChipWorks in Canada. We don't have the tools to do that right now.
However, it turns out that I do not need to have knowledge of how the computer works to get useful work out of it. A lot of nominally computer people program in high level languages, and have absolutely no idea what a compiler is doing behind the scenes, or that there's an assembler involved at all, or a linker. If they learned on Java, they might not even understand pointers. Now I'm not claiming that their work is optimal, or even necessarily efficient, but the point is that their work can be *effective* without them understanding the steps in between the input and the output, other than what input to give it to get a desired output. And if that happens at a low enough relative cost compared to the work product, it can be good enough to be economically viable.
This should be your take-away: We have a compiler. We do not need to understand it to create working programs. It is enough that we can do so.
PS: Yes, I realize that this is somewhat antithetical to the bioinformatics goal of managing and analyzing the data, thereby increasing our understanding of biological processes. But we aren't actually talking so much about doing science here, as we are talking about doing engineering.
-- Terry
So you're saying that it would take just 11 posts on Twitter to kill someone?
BSE destroys your brain. Do most twitterers' first 11 posts show signs of brain activity?
3.2 kbytes should be enough to kill anyone.
Ah, but is that kilobytes or kibibytes?
The coat proteins do more than just carry the DNA to your cells, they allow the virus to actually get inside the cell. That's a pretty major part of a virus, the DNA itself is not going to get inside a cell to produce an infection. There are also more proteins inside many viruses that are essential HIV has several for example. Influenza does too. So it requires more than just the data to kill you.
Viroids are infectious particles that are just nucleotides, just the data. All the viroids that we know of though infect plants, not humans. That wiki page mentions Hepatitis D as viroid like, but it hitches a ride on another hepatitis, without the viral proteins of that virus it can't infect.
I can feel my dial up dialing down... slower already.
http://xkcd.com/435/
not to mention
www.oddsexchange.com (a real site)
So you're saying that it would take just 11 posts on Twitter to kill someone?
It already has. Look at DJ AM.
3.2 kbytes should be enough to kill anyone.
Remind me again; how big is the JPG on goatse?
...to kill a Schroedinger's cat.
You're right, of course, everything you said I pretty much hinted at, however. I wasn't wanting to go too in debt (my mistake).
"The coat proteins do more than just carry the DNA to your cells, they allow the virus to actually get inside the cell." == "The outer coating (proteins) are just the vessel to carry the DNA into your cells"
The protein coat, quite often, mimics a molecule that triggers a cell to eat the virus. Granted, that's just one of the methods various virii (viruses?) use.
"There are also more proteins inside many viruses that are essential HIV has several for example." == "Some, however, come with their own spiffy enzymes that embed DNA into your genome so you can make plenty more..."
This being the exact mechanism that HIV embeds itself into a genome. I'm sure you know that an enzyme is a protein (although, technically a RNA enzyme is not a protein...)
I was poorly arguing that it's the data that one has to be worried about in this case. Free-floating DNA can make its way into a cell, it's rare, but it can happen ("the hard part - but can happen easily sometimes"). I should have been a proper biologist and clarified we're talking eukaryotic cells, bacteria pick up random DNA all the time and do it gleefully (note: bacteria do not contain glee). Bacteria then can run the DNA, eat the DNA, whatever it wants to do.
Once there, the data/DNA then creates havoc by existing, the cell's machinery follows the destructive data and starts to build until it dies (doesn't always die). It builds proteins, which are used to build more virii (viruses?) duplicates more DNA/RNA, the virus self-assembles, leaves and continues on with a nice and shiny protein-coat (or whatever it wants to coat itself with, sometimes parts of you).
Much like a computer virus (DNA) embedded in a program (cell). Normal program instructions are ran, the CPU comes across viral opcodes - runs those too - then continues on like nothing happened...assuming it's a well written computer virus. All the business about transferring a virus via flashdisk, floppy, email, etc (protein coat) - while essential - is secondary to the viral payload itself, the code/data/dna/rna. In my opinion...
I thought experts exchange http://www.experts-exchange.com/ has a hyphen for similar reasons. I can just imagine the google typo suggestion popping up...
In the case of prions, what kills you is not the sequence of amino acids, but the folding. You already have the proteins in your body, just folded the right way. And coding protein folding is tricky, do you need to specify every bond angle and length, or are there just 2 positions(folded right, folded wrong), making it one bit? Both are too extreme, but a wide array of foldings will collapse to the sick one, and a wide array will collapse to the healthy one. So, I suppose the question becomes, what is the proportion of the number of foldings collapsing to the sick one to the number of possible foldings. Or, more precisely, the logarithm of that proportion.
...too in depth. Not that I want to go too in debt, either.
Yeah, but what causes what ? Does twitter cause brain shutdown, or does brain shutdown cause twittering ... or perhaps it's a combination ?
Or a single ethernet frame!
It was expertsexchange.com (without the hyphen) for several years. Can't imagine why they have changed that.
I would say that five posts on Twitter would be more than enough
I would say 1 killer bite would be sufficient!
Correlation is not causation.
I think I'd die if I had to read even less than 11...
Great soundbite. But correlation DOES equal causation. One of three causal relations to be exact.
A and B correlate IF AND ONLY IF
1) A causes B
2) B causes A
3) There is a third variable C that causes both A and B
Note that obviously and unfortunately you need infinite data series to be sure.
Because one cannot differentiate between these 3 the soundbite "correlation is not causation" was created. But it is one of those "technically not a lie" you know like if you drive over someone saying it wasn't your car that killed him (it was the impact, you see).
Don't worry... you're not the only one who thinks outside the box. And you're not the only one who gets flamed for it, either. But... "All great truths begin as blasphemies." -George Bernard Shaw
Truth passes through three stages: First it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as being self-evident. We'll get there eventually--hopefully without becoming one of the casualties.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
The best part of the article is the random "All Your Base" reference.
See, there's so much wrong with the OP that it's not even worth trying to correct him.
Swine Flu has existed for, likely, thousands of years although we only have proof of it since 1930. To say that a vaccine existed before the outbreak, therefore, is ignoring nature's years and years of work on influenza.
Second, the whole 300% baloney. Obviously, numbers like '25 vaccine related deaths to 1 influenza related death' doesn't exactly have shock factor. And 2500% mortality compared to the flu...well, that'll set off even more bullshit alarms.
In fact, even 25 deaths from a vaccine seems downright tame considering the regular flu outbreak takes out ten thousand annually (well, it's either 10 or 20 thou, but either way, we're talking magnitudes of difference. Another point ALWAYS overlooked by fearmongers).
It's just it's not worth trying to point out the flaws in their pseudologic; they're like birthers or moon landing hoax believers. A divine being could materialize in front of them with whatever evidence they want to disprove the outlandish belief, basically flat out go "Look, you're just wrong," and still nothing would change.
So, in the long term, better to just go for the +Funny
'Viruses' is correct. The Latin plural of virus is just 'virus.'
snig
The problem that you don't realize and probably can't realize is that you are messed up in the head. While human history has show awful things have been done, believing fringe conspiracy theories shows that your brain is susceptible to garbage. You probably consider yourself to be more open minded than others...why can't we understand the truth you are saying? In reality, being open minded means that you can consider a thought, but still be able to dismiss it when it doesn't prove itself out.
Let's consider your ideas. On one hand, you have a vaccine that kills a certain percentage of people (let's assume it is less than 300% since I would hope that is a typo). On the other hand, you believe people are creating vaccines for diseases that don't exist yet. The problem is if that were true, why aren't we being vaccinated every month with all these new diseases coming out? I haven't required any strange vaccines for a new disease, have you? H1N1 is just the flu that is slightly more deadly. It has been shown that these things can alter without scientific human intervention. It just changes as it goes from species to species and mutant strains can take off due to natural selection.
But you want to believe that the military complex designed these things. Is this some sort of backward Intelligent Design theory you have?
If everyone is modding you down, it isn't because you see things more clearly. It is because your mind is broken. It is unfortunate that when you are insane, everyone seems against you. You can't see that you fail to see the world correctly since you have some sort of chemical imbalance. So your life is full of anger and mistrust. The problem is you can't trust your own perception. You have to trust others and let them help you. But your insanity doesn't allow you to trust. It's sad.
You claim to want independence, but that is a lie. You don't come to an online forum to find independence. You obviously are here because you want to find others that share your viewpoints so you don't feel so alone. Unfortunately, your viewpoints are wrong and extreme. Until you get past your ego and realize you know nothing and that you need help, your existence will be lonely.
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Seriously, uyou are sounding non sensicle.
I can read that, but for the sake of argument I'm going to claim I can't.
This is stupid.
The size of the object isn't in relation to the damage it can do. This is like saying, I can click the Off checkbox in the power companies power output software and shutdown the entire cities power grid. The size of the action doesn't denote any more or less importance to the effect it can cause.
Plus, there are to many varables and params in the entire experiment. How are you to decide what kills you and what only starts to kill you. Remember the body can also help in killing you. AKA cancer. This type of wasted thought-processes for news saddens me.
"Cry Wolf"
When the shitty trance/techno/house/whatever music kicks in, I'm going to kill myself.
They did a nice job on the 3D fractal video though.
Well, if you decide to call amino acids "bits", then I could do you one better and call atoms or functional groups "bits", and replace a methyl with a cyano (or three hydrogens with a nitrogen), and that would be quick death.
I know viruses reproduce and cyanide does not, so it's not a matter of changing literally one molecule, but from an information perspective (e.g. there's cookbook for humans that includes a recipe for hemoglobin that I could change) it makes some sense.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
No. "Meta" is the most overused bullshit term ever.
It simply means "about".
Any "mata" data has to be external.
You can't have an object with internal meta data (about itself) because that data's existence (regardless of it's content) alters the object, and is part of it.
Even if it were self-referential, it's not meta.
And even if you want to use the word meta to describe it, the shape of a physical object is certainly not meta data. If we're referring to an object as data, then the entirety of the object's physical state must be described as such.
Uh...
4) There is no causal relation, and your sample is shitty.
5) There is no causal relation, your sample is good, and it's just a coincidence.
No he's saying you're a massive faggot for making yet another twitter joke.
but your jest contains a kernel of truth - low amperage circuits (typical of microcircuits) contain a hazard -- a certain lo-amperage, lo-volatage signal affects the heart rate and can cause arythmia's - some severe enough to kill.